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KDevelop 4.6 Beta 1 Available

Submitted by milian
on Mon, 2013/11/11 - 16:05

The KDevelop team is pleased to announce the availability of the first beta release of KDevelop 4.6! This is a testing release and we would be happy about any feedback from early adopters. Please report any issues you find at http://bugs.kde.org.

Overall nearly one thousand commits entered this release. A few highlights are presented below.

UI Cleanups

Quite a few dialogs saw smaller changes to simplify and cleanup the UI. The most notable change though is the removal of the "area" tabs at the top right. Instead, they are replaced by a single button which hopefully clarifies and simplifies the workflow in KDevelop.

Ninja Support

KDevelop 4.6 is the first release to officially support the Ninja build system in addition to Make. Ninja promises higher build performance, so try it out! Note that CMake can be configured to use Ninja instead of Make, thus switching to Ninja is trivial.

Project Filter

The files and folders that are listed in your project folder and below is now properly filterable. The old line edit above the project tree view was removed in favor of this more advanced and efficient filtering approach. If you used the filter line edit to find files based on a pattern in your project, try out QuickOpen of files, which handles this job much better.

Stability and Performance

Besides the big new features listed above, much work was spent on improving the code base to yield a better stability and performance and maintainability. This includes work on QuickOpen to make it even faster for large projects. The output view of processes or compilation output is now filtered on a background thread thus preventing UI freezes under some conditions.

Various

Other areas that where improved are the version control integration and the GDB integration, which got the ability to browse through registers. The CMake support was also greatly improved for this release. It should now be much more reliable and come with support for more features than ever. The C++ language support was also improved in some areas as usual. The PHP support finally was improved to support various new features of PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5.